you have worked five or more years for your employer; and
your employer is in one of the following two groups:
your employer has a payroll in Ontario of at least $2,500,000 a year; or
your employer is no longer going to be carrying on all or part of the business, and 50 or more workers will lose their jobs for this reason inside a six-month period.
How much severance pay do I get?
If you qualify for severance pay, your employer will give you one week's regular pay for each year of employment.
There is a limit of 26 weeks' regular pay for severance pay.
So even if you have worked longer than 26 years, 26 weeks' pay is the most you can get.
You also get credit for full months of employment. For example, if you have worked for 10 ½ years, your employer would pay you 10 ½ weeks' pay as your severance pay.
2, 3, 9 are handled nicely by cvsZilla, which also integrates with Bugzilla to add changelogs to the associated bug. We use this here at work, and it solves a lot of the problems we were having.
http://homepages.kcbbs.gen.nz/~tonyg/
CVSZilla also allows for the tracking of tags/branches.
4 emacs does this!:)
6 CVSWeb/viewCVS.
8, 10, 11, 12 are all already built into CVS.
So, that leaves 1, 5, 7. These would need actual changes to CVS... 1 and 5 would be really useful.
But the good ones _love_ it when the patient comes in knowing what's wrong. If you can say, "I had this last year, the doctor gave me this and it went away." Helps shortcut the whole thing.
Everyone's arguing back and forth about which is better, UDP, TCP, some are even presenting other protocols such as SCTP. None of it matters, because the protocol you use depends on what the problem is.
From what I understand, UDP will lose packets in a congested environment when passing across a router. Your stack will guarantee that the packet gets onto the wire, if it gets onto the wire, it will make it onto the other machine if it is on the same wire (subnet) (barring sunspots). As soon as it hits a router, then it can be dropped.
TCP has some nasty timers in it that make it entirely unsuitable for real-time traffic. It assumes that a packet was lost because of congestion, and backs off on the retry, rather than retransmitting immediately. In modern corporate/telco IP networks congestion simply isn't the case. What really is bad is having to wait up to 4+minutes to find out the connection is dead.
UDP allows you to do what you want, and avoid anything you don't need. However, if you need things like in-order, reliable transmission you are probably better off with TCP. If you are simply providing a response, then you should be fine with UDP.
If you are after high-traffic, high connection, high throughput, UDP seems to be the way to go. If you are after easy programming and guaranteed in-order delivery, TCP is your tool.
As someone pointed out, there is a new player in town, and that's SCTP. It was invented specifically because TCP is bad for low-latency transmissions (such as Telephony!). It is used in the SS7 over IP protocols, such as M3UA, SUA, etc.
That is why you will see a mix of streams in various protocols. H.323 uses TCP for control, and UDP for speech/video. SIP allows you the choice of UDP/TCP for call control.
Jason Pollock
Re:Cost of failure.
on
Baked Alaska
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I'm not against intelligent ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions when they don't cost too much, but that is the key. Creating huge economic inefficiencies for something that may or may not have an effect on something that may or may not be caused by the emissions in the first place is what is bad.
The issue has to be what is the potential cost of not doing anything. It doesn't matter if you caused the problem with car exhaust, or if it's the Earth's core turning up the heat. If the sea levels go up by as little 5', most of the people on the coast will have to move. Can you imagine the $$ involved in protecting New Orleans alone?
As with anything, we shouldn't have a panic response. However, doing nothing because we believe (rightly or wrongly - who cares) that warming is natural isn't a solution.
This is why we build flood control systems. It may be a natural event, but we still act to mitigate the damage caused. We need to do the same on a global scale to handle global warming.
Sure, companies will go under, others will flourish, and new millions will be made. Is that a problem? Probably not, look what happened to the.coms. No lasting damage was done. I would say that the displacement of coastal populations is going to be worse, but that's just a guess...:)
I think if you go back and re-read the post, you'll find that we agree.:) As I said, it seems obvious to me that global warming is happening, and there is no point arguing why it is happening, only on what we're going to do about it. As you pointed out non-existence proofs are extremely difficult, as are existence proofs for things that aren't immediately testable/visible.
Jason Pollock
Cost of failure.
on
Baked Alaska
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
There is a difference between the two. The cost of the correlation between masturbation/eyesight is a pair of glasses. The cost of global warming is conceivably a lot higher, and so deserves more attention and effort.
I think a better example would be the Challenger disaster, which killed the crew, and stopped NASA in its tracks for years. All because they asked the engineers to "Put their management hats on".
At the end of the day, we have three things to decide:
Is Global Warming is happening? The answer seems to be "Yes".
Should we do anything about it?
What can we do about it?
Now, we can argue about what the causes of global warming are, but that shouldn't stop us from finding a solution. There are only a few variables that we can conceivably control to bring the warming back down. One of those is CO2 emissions. It doesn't matter if the warming is a result of human activity, all that does matter is that it is happening and that we need to do something about it.
Strange that you haven't had a mail crash. What are you using?
Here's an example of what I've seen: Outlook had an interesting bug, that if you forwarded an email with an attachment, the program would crash the sending queue. You couldn't delete the email because it was locked by the sending queue process (which was dead). And, outlook wouldn't let you start up without attempting to send the email.
Kmail 2.2.2 has had some problems recently with mime attachments. I have an email that when I attempt to save the attachment, the file dialog never appears. grep/mimencode to the rescue.
Eudora has had various problems (been a while since I've used it).
Netscape, I've never used it, but the complaining from the other end of the office is pretty indicative.:)
Kmail 1.x had a problem with compressing folders.
All that being said, this was a discussion on MUA, which typically is considered single user.
I don't have a problem with using a database as an index, with the actual messages stored elsewhere, but I would like to be able to get at the email with fgrep, vi, etc. if needed.
Notice, the ssh in and grep text out of it. That's my point.:) If it was in a database, you wouldn't be able to grep it.
I was using a beta copy of evolution at the time it happened to me, but that doesn't mean that it won't happen again. Next time, I want the same ability to get at my email using grep.:)
Actually, it's more usually searching for something in the body of the email. Databases aren't known for text searches in unindexed columns, which the body column would be. However, this is _exactly_ what fgrep/et al are for.
ie select body from mail where body like %database% (yeah, it's wrong, but you get the idea) vs fgrep database mdir/* mbox
The problem with using database formats is that you can't access them with vi. How many times has your mail client crashed attempting to read an email, but you still _need_ to get access to it? If it's in a database (proprietary or not), you're up the creek. If it's stored in a flat file, you at least have the option of using vi/emacs/grep to find and read the email, and then excise it.
This has happened to me in Netscape, Kmail, Outlook, Evolution, Eudora, etc. Every single one has had problems at one point or another. The best programs are the ones that are _truly_ open, and let you get at the mail from other directions.
Don't doubt the power of the text utilities in Unix.:)
If you read the article, you'll notice that this only effects Telecom's unlimited traffic service. If you are going to pay for your traffic, by using one of the other plans, then everything is cool.
This is the flaw behind _every_ unlimited traffic plan there is. It is no longer economically viable because people are now able to saturate their links while they aren't there, and without running traditional "servers". As we saw with AOL/Time Warner, everyone is putting free traffic caps on their services.
The silly thing is that Saturn, the cable broadband competitor tried out a flat fee all you can eat broadband about a year ago. They abandoned it after about 6 months for the same reason. Their comparable plan gives you 10GB of traffic per month.
How can an average user be expected to know how much bandwidth they are using per month?
The ISP I use here in New Zealand offers you real-time (in the last hour) traffic data. They tell you which site you went to, how much traffic you downloaded, everything.
You check it every day or so and you'll know when you are downloading too much.:) It only takes a couple large traffic bills to convince you that leaving gnutella on overnight is a "bad thing".:)
Thats like saying that increasing the price of food is good because it will help end obesity.
It's getting to a "user pays" situation that is a good thing. A better metaphor might be having cigarette taxes that cover the cost of smoking related disease.
Heh. Yep. That is an idea. And then the cost would be ~US$5. This points out that the value (to the downloader) of Serious Sam is US$5, which (going back to my original argument) is a good thing to know, and provides more information than is available now.
How am I to contribute to large software projects with these leaches charging me so much to check out?
Ah, come on, try using cvs -z 3 or something.:) CVS changes are small, and I wouldn't think you would have any trouble fitting them into just about any bandwidth alottment.
A curse on these asses who wish to return to the bad old days of boxed software, Ma Bell, and all other manner of greedy grabbing oppresion. Ludites all!
Nope, just a someone asking people to pay their own way.:)
I do think metering is the answer, but what you're describing is a ripoff.
Perhaps, however, the prices I quoted are for NZ, and the traffic does have to go across an undersea cable to get to the US. We're at the far end of a small(ish) connection, and the price reflects this (+rounding). In the US, the cost is probably lower, and the price may reflect this. However, AOL/TW is a huge company, and that comes with it's own cost inflations.
Personally, I don't have a problem paying the money. I can play on the local game servers (any FPS you can name) for free, and there is a local debian mirror to help those people out. Besides, they're cheaper than ADSL, which bills all traffic at the international rate. To top it off, I can get more traffic at ~US$9/GB ahead of time.
It's all about recouping costs, and I would rather pay for my usage than subsidise someone down the street.:)
Good comment, it's making me expand on my position. On to your issues!
Anyway, contrary to your statement, there are legitimate uses for large downloads and according to current plans this shall only increase (download a DVD instead of renting one). The bandwidth cost should be lower than sending the CD/DVD by mail, otherwise a lot of future appeal of the Internet is lost.
I don't believe I said that there weren't any good high-bandwidth uses. What I was saying was that until such time as we got to a "user pays" method of charging for traffic, there was no way of determining the value of the item being downloaded. Now, there is a fixed cost, regardless of the method of procurement (theft or otherwise).
For legitimate businesses, I think we will see
interchange agreements, much like we already have between phone companies, where the business says that they will give the carrier a kickback in order to have lower fees. The business puts in servers at the carrier's points of presence, and slam bam, the carriers costs go down and the charge is reduced for that site.
This could even be done on a large scale, with companies like akamai (do they still exist?)
We already have examples of this sort of thing with "preferred" sites and AOL.
This isn't bad, it's the market working.
a) It means someone (say, the 16-year-old using the familay computer)can try out a new operating system without paying $50. Seriously, how many people would have ever tried Linux, would have ever used anything besides Windows, if they had had to pay for a boxed distro instead of downloading one? (I know I sure as hell wouldn't have - let me tell you, when I started using Linux, I was in high school, and I did not have $50 lying around to test something I didn't need.) That's how Linux started - people in colleges freely downloading Slack to try out on their 386s.
The GPL isn't about gratis, it's about libre. The GPL even says that it is perfectly acceptable to recoup the cost of distribution. It is just that until this point, it hasn't been possible because traffic is unmetered.
I have no doubt it will still be possible to get cheap copies of GPL code. download.com and fileplanet.com used to offer the ability to get the file burned to CD and shipped to you. Cheapbytes offers this service for linux releases. How does Mandrake for $5.99 strike you? RH 7.2? $3.99.
Someone has to recoup the cost of delivery. That is either assumed by the person giving you your net connection (university, carrier) or yourself. Personally, I'm all for user pays. Only at that point do we truly figure out the worth of these items. Otherwise, they can only be valued at 0.
b) You know Linux's vaunted stability and high bug-catching rate? Yeah? You know where that comes from? I'll tell you. People downloading betas and unfinished distros to test them. Your plan would entail causing the download a beta to cost more than buying a release version. You know where Linux's stability and security goes from there? Down the drain.
I doubt it. First off, we don't have the particulars of the AOL/TW's plan, so we have no idea what the net effect will be. However, 1GB is a _lot_ of traffic if you aren't pulling down movies. I think it is more than enough to keep track of beta (binary!) updates. Even easier if you are pulling down CVS changes. cvs -z 9 here we come!
Also, in my experience carriers let you pre-purchase additional traffic at a discount. So, if you think you are going to be using 3-5GBs, buy it.
Now we'll see what people see as the real value of mp3s. Is it still a good idea to download it if the download is going to cost you 10c/meg? We'll find out shortly.
I already live in the world of the monthly free traffic quota. Here in New Zealand, I have a 2meg down/256k up cable connection, with 1Gb of (international) traffic free for ~US$40.
Traffic charges are tiered with national traffic (NZ) is at US$.008/meg and international traffic is at US$.08c/meg. So, downloading that image of Serious Sam SE will set you back US$52. All of a sudden, it makes sense to go out and buy the thing for ~US$40.
I can't see this as anything other than a positive development.
Before anyone starts, think about what this will do for the packaged linux software business. It might actually be cheaper to go out and buy the CD than download the ISO from Red Hat. All of a sudden RH turns a sale with a cost to them into a sale with profit! That _has_ to be a good thing.
Where I work, it has been a commonly held belief that all software evolves until such time as it can send and receive email. If it doesn't do this, it isn't complete.:)
I have a question. How does the Lorenz effect (I assume this is the polarity change on the photons) work when in the presence of signal amplifiers? Since signal amplifiers basically re-emit the light, doesn't that hose the whole thing? Meaning that it can only be used for short runs of cable.
As for the rest, I agree, always attack the easy bit.
Slashdot Mirror
Here are Ontario's provisions:
Jason PollockThere's an old RFC that discusses this very thing: rfc2116
It's from '96, so it's probably incredibly out of date, but it might be a good place to start?
A lot of this can already done with CVS+extras...
:)
2, 3, 9 are handled nicely by cvsZilla, which also integrates with Bugzilla to add changelogs to the associated bug. We use this here at work, and it solves a lot of the problems we were having.
http://homepages.kcbbs.gen.nz/~tonyg/
CVSZilla also allows for the tracking of tags/branches.
4 emacs does this!
6 CVSWeb/viewCVS.
8, 10, 11, 12 are all already built into CVS.
So, that leaves 1, 5, 7. These would need actual changes to CVS... 1 and 5 would be really useful.
Jason Pollock
But the good ones _love_ it when the patient comes in knowing what's wrong. If you can say, "I had this last year, the doctor gave me this and it went away." Helps shortcut the whole thing.
Jason
Everyone's arguing back and forth about which is better, UDP, TCP, some are even presenting other protocols such as SCTP. None of it matters, because the protocol you use depends on what the problem is.
From what I understand, UDP will lose packets in a congested environment when passing across a router. Your stack will guarantee that the packet gets onto the wire, if it gets onto the wire, it will make it onto the other machine if it is on the same wire (subnet) (barring sunspots). As soon as it hits a router, then it can be dropped.
TCP has some nasty timers in it that make it entirely unsuitable for real-time traffic. It assumes that a packet was lost because of congestion, and backs off on the retry, rather than retransmitting immediately. In modern corporate/telco IP networks congestion simply isn't the case. What really is bad is having to wait up to 4+minutes to find out the connection is dead.
UDP allows you to do what you want, and avoid anything you don't need. However, if you need things like in-order, reliable transmission you are probably better off with TCP. If you are simply providing a response, then you should be fine with UDP.
If you are after high-traffic, high connection, high throughput, UDP seems to be the way to go. If you are after easy programming and guaranteed in-order delivery, TCP is your tool.
As someone pointed out, there is a new player in town, and that's SCTP. It was invented specifically because TCP is bad for low-latency transmissions (such as Telephony!). It is used in the SS7 over IP protocols, such as M3UA, SUA, etc.
That is why you will see a mix of streams in various protocols. H.323 uses TCP for control, and UDP for speech/video. SIP allows you the choice of UDP/TCP for call control.
Jason Pollock
The issue has to be what is the potential cost of not doing anything. It doesn't matter if you caused the problem with car exhaust, or if it's the Earth's core turning up the heat. If the sea levels go up by as little 5', most of the people on the coast will have to move. Can you imagine the $$ involved in protecting New Orleans alone?
As with anything, we shouldn't have a panic response. However, doing nothing because we believe (rightly or wrongly - who cares) that warming is natural isn't a solution.
This is why we build flood control systems. It may be a natural event, but we still act to mitigate the damage caused. We need to do the same on a global scale to handle global warming.
Sure, companies will go under, others will flourish, and new millions will be made. Is that a problem? Probably not, look what happened to the .coms. No lasting damage was done. I would say that the displacement of coastal populations is going to be worse, but that's just a guess... :)
Jason PollockI think if you go back and re-read the post, you'll find that we agree. :) As I said, it seems obvious to me that global warming is happening, and there is no point arguing why it is happening, only on what we're going to do about it. As you pointed out non-existence proofs are extremely difficult, as are existence proofs for things that aren't immediately testable/visible.
Jason Pollock
There is a difference between the two. The cost of the correlation between masturbation/eyesight is a pair of glasses. The cost of global warming is conceivably a lot higher, and so deserves more attention and effort.
I think a better example would be the Challenger disaster, which killed the crew, and stopped NASA in its tracks for years. All because they asked the engineers to "Put their management hats on".
At the end of the day, we have three things to decide:
Now, we can argue about what the causes of global warming are, but that shouldn't stop us from finding a solution. There are only a few variables that we can conceivably control to bring the warming back down. One of those is CO2 emissions. It doesn't matter if the warming is a result of human activity, all that does matter is that it is happening and that we need to do something about it.
Jason PollockStrange that you haven't had a mail crash. What are you using?
:)
Here's an example of what I've seen:
Outlook had an interesting bug, that if you forwarded an email with an attachment, the program would crash the sending queue. You couldn't delete the email because it was locked by the sending queue process (which was dead). And, outlook wouldn't let you start up without attempting to send the email.
Kmail 2.2.2 has had some problems recently with mime attachments. I have an email that when I attempt to save the attachment, the file dialog never appears. grep/mimencode to the rescue.
Eudora has had various problems (been a while since I've used it).
Netscape, I've never used it, but the complaining from the other end of the office is pretty indicative.
Kmail 1.x had a problem with compressing folders.
All that being said, this was a discussion on MUA, which typically is considered single user.
I don't have a problem with using a database as an index, with the actual messages stored elsewhere, but I would like to be able to get at the email with fgrep, vi, etc. if needed.
Jason Pollock
That just shifts the point of failure to the IMAP server. The problems with using databases as mail stores still exist.
Notice, the ssh in and grep text out of it. That's my point. :) If it was in a database, you wouldn't be able to grep it.
:)
I was using a beta copy of evolution at the time it happened to me, but that doesn't mean that it won't happen again. Next time, I want the same ability to get at my email using grep.
Jason
Actually, it's more usually searching for something in the body of the email. Databases aren't known for text searches in unindexed columns, which the body column would be. However, this is _exactly_ what fgrep/et al are for.
ie select body from mail where body like %database%
(yeah, it's wrong, but you get the idea)
vs fgrep database mdir/* mbox
Jason Pollock
The problem with using database formats is that you can't access them with vi. How many times has your mail client crashed attempting to read an email, but you still _need_ to get access to it? If it's in a database (proprietary or not), you're up the creek. If it's stored in a flat file, you at least have the option of using vi/emacs/grep to find and read the email, and then excise it.
This has happened to me in Netscape, Kmail, Outlook, Evolution, Eudora, etc. Every single one has had problems at one point or another. The best programs are the ones that are _truly_ open, and let you get at the mail from other directions.
Don't doubt the power of the text utilities in Unix. :)
Jason Pollock
I've searched, and I've been unable to find any information telling me what radio stations currently pay to air a song.
Anyone know?
Jason Pollock
If you read the article, you'll notice that this only effects Telecom's unlimited traffic service. If you are going to pay for your traffic, by using one of the other plans, then everything is cool.
This is the flaw behind _every_ unlimited traffic plan there is. It is no longer economically viable because people are now able to saturate their links while they aren't there, and without running traditional "servers". As we saw with AOL/Time Warner, everyone is putting free traffic caps on their services.
The silly thing is that Saturn, the cable broadband competitor tried out a flat fee all you can eat broadband about a year ago. They abandoned it after about 6 months for the same reason. Their comparable plan gives you 10GB of traffic per month.
Jason PollockThe ISP I use here in New Zealand offers you real-time (in the last hour) traffic data. They tell you which site you went to, how much traffic you downloaded, everything.
You check it every day or so and you'll know when you are downloading too much. :) It only takes a couple large traffic bills to convince you that leaving gnutella on overnight is a "bad thing". :)
It's getting to a "user pays" situation that is a good thing. A better metaphor might be having cigarette taxes that cover the cost of smoking related disease.
Jason PollockHeh. Yep. That is an idea. And then the cost would be ~US$5. This points out that the value (to the downloader) of Serious Sam is US$5, which (going back to my original argument) is a good thing to know, and provides more information than is available now.
Jason PollockAh, come on, try using cvs -z 3 or something. :) CVS changes are small, and I wouldn't think you would have any trouble fitting them into just about any bandwidth alottment.
A curse on these asses who wish to return to the bad old days of boxed software, Ma Bell, and all other manner of greedy grabbing oppresion. Ludites all!
Nope, just a someone asking people to pay their own way. :)
Jason Pollock
Perhaps, however, the prices I quoted are for NZ, and the traffic does have to go across an undersea cable to get to the US. We're at the far end of a small(ish) connection, and the price reflects this (+rounding). In the US, the cost is probably lower, and the price may reflect this. However, AOL/TW is a huge company, and that comes with it's own cost inflations.
Personally, I don't have a problem paying the money. I can play on the local game servers (any FPS you can name) for free, and there is a local debian mirror to help those people out. Besides, they're cheaper than ADSL, which bills all traffic at the international rate. To top it off, I can get more traffic at ~US$9/GB ahead of time.
It's all about recouping costs, and I would rather pay for my usage than subsidise someone down the street. :)
Jason PollockGood comment, it's making me expand on my position. On to your issues!
I don't believe I said that there weren't any good high-bandwidth uses. What I was saying was that until such time as we got to a "user pays" method of charging for traffic, there was no way of determining the value of the item being downloaded. Now, there is a fixed cost, regardless of the method of procurement (theft or otherwise).
For legitimate businesses, I think we will see interchange agreements, much like we already have between phone companies, where the business says that they will give the carrier a kickback in order to have lower fees. The business puts in servers at the carrier's points of presence, and slam bam, the carriers costs go down and the charge is reduced for that site.
This could even be done on a large scale, with companies like akamai (do they still exist?)
We already have examples of this sort of thing with "preferred" sites and AOL. This isn't bad, it's the market working.
Jason PollockThe GPL isn't about gratis, it's about libre. The GPL even says that it is perfectly acceptable to recoup the cost of distribution. It is just that until this point, it hasn't been possible because traffic is unmetered.
I have no doubt it will still be possible to get cheap copies of GPL code. download.com and fileplanet.com used to offer the ability to get the file burned to CD and shipped to you. Cheapbytes offers this service for linux releases. How does Mandrake for $5.99 strike you? RH 7.2? $3.99.
Someone has to recoup the cost of delivery. That is either assumed by the person giving you your net connection (university, carrier) or yourself. Personally, I'm all for user pays. Only at that point do we truly figure out the worth of these items. Otherwise, they can only be valued at 0.
I doubt it. First off, we don't have the particulars of the AOL/TW's plan, so we have no idea what the net effect will be. However, 1GB is a _lot_ of traffic if you aren't pulling down movies. I think it is more than enough to keep track of beta (binary!) updates. Even easier if you are pulling down CVS changes. cvs -z 9 here we come!
Also, in my experience carriers let you pre-purchase additional traffic at a discount. So, if you think you are going to be using 3-5GBs, buy it.
Jason PollockNow we'll see what people see as the real value of mp3s. Is it still a good idea to download it if the download is going to cost you 10c/meg? We'll find out shortly.
I already live in the world of the monthly free traffic quota. Here in New Zealand, I have a 2meg down/256k up cable connection, with 1Gb of (international) traffic free for ~US$40.
Traffic charges are tiered with national traffic (NZ) is at US$.008/meg and international traffic is at US$.08c/meg. So, downloading that image of Serious Sam SE will set you back US$52. All of a sudden, it makes sense to go out and buy the thing for ~US$40.
I can't see this as anything other than a positive development.
Before anyone starts, think about what this will do for the packaged linux software business. It might actually be cheaper to go out and buy the CD than download the ISO from Red Hat. All of a sudden RH turns a sale with a cost to them into a sale with profit! That _has_ to be a good thing.
Jason PollockWhere I work, it has been a commonly held belief that all software evolves until such time as it can send and receive email. If it doesn't do this, it isn't complete. :)
Jason PollockI have a question. How does the Lorenz effect (I assume this is the polarity change on the photons) work when in the presence of signal amplifiers? Since signal amplifiers basically re-emit the light, doesn't that hose the whole thing? Meaning that it can only be used for short runs of cable.
As for the rest, I agree, always attack the easy bit.
Jason Pollock